6 Pro Intercom Tips To Advance Your Customer Communication

Have you ever wanted to get the most from Intercom? Yeah, I bet you did. But there is usually one problem — no manuals or hacks for what you want to achieve. And figuring it out on your own can be a nightmare.

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Be the pro user

That’s why we asked around Intercom pro users to share some secret hacks that help them communicate better to their customers. So here they are, 6 tips to get the most out of Intercom.

1. Chase failed credit card payments

Payment fail is an awkward situation for the Customer and the company. It happens either because of the incorrectly submitted information, churn or insufficient funds.

None the less it creates an unpleasant atmosphere and can be a starting point of an argument with a customer.

In situations like this, you need to guide your customer step by step to provide a top of the line customer experience. To be up-to-date with the payments integrate Stripe with Intercom.

Expert Tip

Integrate Stripe with your Intercom app (one click set up guide here). Set up your campaign with a couple of chaser emails.

First one should be an informative message such as “your payment failed, here’s what to do next” and second being “your retry failed. Here’s what to do next.” Then use the following logic:

1. Enter campaign of charge failed exactly 0 days ago.
2. Created their subscription more than a day ago.
3. Set them 4 days apart because Stripe retires after 3 days.
4. Set the goal as “charge is triggered”

2. Eliminate the confusion with drag and drop GIFs

Sometimes it’s hard to communicate with words and it’s best to switch directly to finger-pointing and send screen recordings, GIFs, or screenshots to solve customer’s problem. It eliminates the compleity and increases the clarity of the message.

There are several tools already built in your Mac or PC. However, they usually give you one feature. QuickTime can record your screen, a Preview or a Snipping Tool can modify your screenshot.

Using these tools separately is time-consuming, and you usually end up looking all over the folders to find the files.

Expert Tip

Try using third-party tools that provide all-in-one solutions, such as Droplr. Droplr offers screen recordings, GIF, and annotated screenshots. It’s integrated with Intercom, which makes it very easy to use.

By using a Droplr app in the menu bar you can quickly access your screens and drag and drop them to Intercom conversations. It not only adds clarity but also speeds things up.

3. Find out how good is your email campaign

Everything has to be measured these days, and thatalso includes the effectiveness of your email campaign. Intercom can show how many people received an email, how many opened it and clicked, how many converted.

But how can you know what impact had your email campaign on conversion rate? Would the users have converted anyway?

Expert Tip

By importing Intercom conversation data into InnerTrends, you can analyze the influence each email has on specific goals by finding out:
– how many people did not open an email
– how many converted

By comparing these numbers, you will have a very accurate image of the impact of your Intercom campaigns. Identifying the campaigns that underperform gives you the power to mend them and make the most out of your Intercom setup.

4. Use Intercom to track user’s NPSⓇ score

Net Promoter Score is one of the industry’s gold standard in monitoring customer’s satisfaction with a product. By segmenting customers on a scale from 0 to 10, you’re able to assess how likely they are to recommend your product to others.

We create an in-message survey directly in Survicate, set up the survey (writing down our question with all the possible answers (0 to 10, etc.). Then we map each answer in Intercom according to how we want them to appear in the app.

Back in the Survicate app we tick the Intercom Integration box and copy the survey snippet. After that, we create a smart campaign in Intercom and set up who we want to send it to.

The Last step is to, paste the survey snippet within the Intercom message and that’s it.

Tip by Caroline Wisniewski, Product Marketing and Business Intelligence at Doctolib

5. Prevent churn by monitoring customer engagement movements

Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to prevent churn and act even before your users click that unsubscribe button? It’s possible; you just have to have the right tools and intelligence.

Here’s an Intercom tip from a pro user. By combining Intercom communication powers with Inner Trends machine learning, you can detect users that are losing interest in the product and ultimately keep them as your customers.

Expert Tip

The first step to implement this Intercom tip is to categorize all users or customers by their engagement level. We use four categories of engagement: high, medium, low and very low.

A machine learning algorithm sets the thresholds of the engagement categories automatically by learning the behavior of users that churned on one side and the users with the highest engagement on the other side.

Every time a user moves from one engagement level to another, we sync the change with Intercom. We update three fields in Intercom:
– Old engagement level
– New engagement level
– Date of change
We then set up an Engage campaign in Intercom, targeting users that start to lose interest in the product.

6. Segment your users and leads with survey

Segmenting your users based on their behavior or actions is nothing new in Intercom. However, the data from these sources might be misleading or incomplete. You might want to deploy optimized onboarding or even discover reasons why users churn.

With Survicate Intercom Integration you can collect the feedback from your users and then create attributes, events, and tags based on the collected data.

Expert Tip

Integrate your Intercom with Survicate (more on that here). Create surveys and distribute them by email, Intercom messages or on site.

You can target them to specific users based on your Intercom segments. It allowed us to enrich data on our users at various parts of our funnel including pre-purchase, onboarding, using, canceling, and new product features.

Once collected, we can easily sort through different segments in Intercom and dispatch the appropriate emails and messages to our users.